Letters to the editor: 06-12-18

Tuesday, June 12, 2018, 12:05 a.m.

Share this story

Spoiled evidence baffling

The property department left vital evidence where rodents could have access to them!? What kind of incompetent boobs are running that place? How about we leave their paychecks where the termites have access to them?

ADVERTISING

Graham Moody

Kamuela

Another in the air quality dark

I am adding my voice to the general outcry about lack of information about air quality. I can certainly tell the intensity each day I get a headache and sore throat.

South Kona gets it very strongly when the trade winds come, yet the local TV news barely mentions it. Seems to me they are contributing to the tourism propaganda that everyone should just get on a plane and come on over.

Without accurate information I don’t see how all the summer camps and activities for children can make any plans for being outdoors without harm. It is the stuff you can’t see that is the most damaging.

I am truly sorry for all who are losing work, but this is too serious to ignore when we are all in uncertain peril from airborne chemicals. We need accurate daily updates for each community.

Louise Winn

Kona

Monthly column too
loose on facts

Like many West Hawaii Today readers before me, I often find the highly opinionated comments of Mikie Kerr entirely inappropriate. Her most recent diatribe against U.S. Judge John Bates (“Judicial Overreach,” June 8) was an example of poor scholarship and weak legal thinking.

Bates, in fact an appointee of George W. Bush, is not the first but the third judge to rule against the Trump administration attempts to arbitrarily rescind DACA. Not mentioned by Kerr is that Judge William Alsup in San Francisco and Nicholas Garaufis in New York already ruled similarly.

Essentially they are saying that before a president can arbitrarily and summarily reverse a policy which was put in place years earlier by another administration, and upon which over 690,000 people have acted and depended, the administration must proceed in an orderly and legal way. This is absolutely not “judicial overreach” but is the protection of the courts afforded against tyrannical governmental orders.

Kerr is moreover wrong about executive orders. By saying they do not create new law and do not bind successive presidents, she ignores that they indeed do have the force of law so long as they remain in effect. The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order. The Peace Corps came into existence by executive order. Such orders must grow out of existing law — such as those governing how to enforce our current immigration laws — and can be revised or repealed by a subsequent president but only if she or he follows proper administrative procedure, which the Trump administration absolutely refused to do. Because most non-lawyers in the general public don’t know these things, Kerr can be exceptionally dangerous in her musings. WHT should exercise some care in publishing her comments, perhaps having them reviewed by a competent attorney first.